


Being Alive

by HexMeridian (myrainbowshoelaces)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Blood and Gore, Corpses, Crying, Dead Dave, Feelings Jams, Feels, Friends to Lovers, Kissing, M/M, Meteorstuck, Minor Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Quadrant Confusion, Sadstuck, Time Shenanigans, Wakes & Funerals, davekat - Freeform, making fandoms cry with Steven Sondheim, starts really dark but gets better I promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 23:31:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7128404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myrainbowshoelaces/pseuds/HexMeridian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Somebody crowd me with love.</em><br/><em>Somebody force me to care.</em><br/><em>Somebody let me come through,</em><br/><em>I’ll always be there,</em><br/><em>As frightened as you,</em><br/><em>To help us survive,</em><br/><em>Being alive.</em>(<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WkzOywmPPU">x</a>)</p><p>a.k.a. Dave and Karkat have the strangest and possibly the most fucked up first date in the history of paradox space.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Being Alive

You’re running after Dave down the corridor outside the old lab when you almost trip over the body. For a minute you think the worst, your bloodpusher suddenly in your throat and your sickles dropping out of your specibus and into your hands, whirling around in the dark listening for even the faintest echo of a honk. Sure, Gamzee is supposed to be under Vriska’s supervision, but after what had just happened you trust her even less than before, which is an achievement in and of itself.

  
You get a better look at the lifeless form at your feet. You drop both your sickles and stumble backwards, feeling the grubloaf you ate for lunch churning in your stomach. “Oh gog,” you whisper, your voice cracking. The entire world goes red and you barely even notice that you’re on your knees until you’re holding the body in your arms. “No, nonono, this is fucking… NO.”

  
You shake Dave’s corpse, his head lolling against your chest like he’s a puppet with cut strings. This isn’t happening. It can’t be happening. This can’t be real, it is literally almost impossible for Dave to die, he’s god tier. Never mind that, fuck, he was right in front of you seconds ago when you were running after him!

You wonder if it’s a heroic death, but how the fuck could it be? It makes no sense, this doesn’t make any sense. You feel your hands start to shake and in an act of pure desperation, even though you fucking doubt it’s something that works on a god tier player, you lean down and do the only thing you can think of.

It isn’t the first kiss with Dave you wanted, and it clearly doesn’t do any good. Dave’s lips are cold and he stays limp and you keep looking down at him in disbelief because this can’t be happening, nothing about this can be real, it has to be a dream bubble or something, please be a dream bubble, gog fucking PLEASE.

You don’t wake up. Dave doesn’t move. Inside you everything screams at you just like it does at night when you catch stolen moments of sleep, the voices of your dead friends calling your name, begging you to save them, _save us please Karkat, why didn’t you save us? Why weren’t you there?_

You couldn’t save them. Couldn’t protect them. Now you’re holding the proof that you can’t ever protect anyone, Dave dead in your arms with red blood crusted on his cape and his shades almost broken in half.

You’ve failed again.

  
You don’t know how long you sit there cradling the corpse, but when you hear footsteps in front of you it’s enough to get you to glance up.

You almost drop the body because Dave is standing in front of you, sheet-white and sweating and staring at you with his mouth open like he’s looking at ghosts. He’s never looked more afraid.

“Fuck,” he says, and you keep looking up at him, looking down at the body, going from one to the other in an attempt to understand just what the fuck you are even seeing here. The body in your arms is Dave but so is the living and breathing person standing there, and they’re identical except for the cracked glasses and the gaping wound in dead Dave’s stomach.

You try to speak but all that comes out is your breath, hissing between your teeth. The two of you stare at each other in silence and you feel relief slam into you like some kind of ocean wave, violent and crushing and overwhelming.

You let the body slip out of your arms and you get to your feet, running down the hall before Dave can even register what’s going on. He grunts as you fling yourself at him, arms around his neck and face buried in his shoulder, and as he carefully winds his arms around your waist you feel how hard he’s shaking too.

“‘M sorry,” you hear Dave whisper, his voice thick. “Nobody was supposed to see that. Him. Me. Fuck.” He swallows hard and releases you, cueing you to do the same. Neither of you has ever been prone to displays of affection, especially not towards each other, not when it makes things weird, and you back away until you’re leaning against the wall of the corridor, shoving your hands in your pockets so Dave won’t see that they’re still shaking.

You aren’t sure if anything you say will help, so you go with the next best thing. “What the fuck happened?”

Dave sniffs loudly, leaning against the opposite wall, his hands shoved into his armpits so that he looks like he’s giving himself a hug. “Left after Vriska called me a useless piece of shit and a burden to the team,” he says. “Had a moment of temporary insanity and decided to just hop back in time and not go to the stupid fucking meeting in the first place. So,” he gestures to the body. “Doomed timeline. Dead Dave.”

You can’t stop yourself from staring. “This has happened before?”

“Not here,” Dave shakes his head. “Back when we were in our session, yeah. Careless jumping through time is a recipe for doomed timelines, and paradox spaces fixes your fuck ups by fucking you up.” He laughs mirthlessly and you feel your stomach twist. “Took a lot of trial and error but I’d almost been getting fuckin’ good at it before I went god tier. Those time loops were so stable they had mortgages and college funds for their kids, I was so beyond on top of it I was above it, looking down surveying my domain like fuck yeah I have made time my paradoxical lego set and I will build a fucking masterpiece of plastic architecture on its bitch face.”

You blink, trying to parse his meaning through the incomprehensible references. “Did you know this would happen?” you ask. “If you tried to change the past I mean.”

“I mean, I knew,” Dave is staring at the floor a couple inches away from his body. “It’s like how Rose knows how to See or what the fuck ever, I know how time works, I just…” he trails off, pressing his back against the wall and looking up at the ceiling. “For a second I let go. I didn’t think. And when I don’t think…” he trails off again, gesturing to the body. “Dead Daves start piling up, and Dead Daves are the enemy.”

You look over at the body, then back to Dave. You don’t know what’s more unnerving, the fact that there are two Daves or the fact that you can absolutely confirm that this isn’t the first time he’s come face to face with his own corpse.

“What do we do about…” you trail off, unsure what the appropriate term is for the situation. “You. The body. You know.”

Dave shrugs. “Fuck if I know, unless there’s a convenient lava ocean somewhere on this meteor, I’m fresh out of ideas.”

“There’s a trash incinerator in one of the lower labs,” you say. “It’s a bit of a walk but it’s better than letting… you… rot out here in the open.”

“That works,” Dave agrees. The two of you turn to the body and stare for a moment, wondering just how the fuck you were gonna carry it.

“Can a sylladex hold a body?” Dave asks after a moment.

“Maybe?”

“Hope so,” Dave mutters. “It’d be pretty fucked up if we had to mutilate my corpse before we burned it.”

You feel the bile rise in your protein chute again and you cough, trying to think about literally anything but Dave’s cherry red blood spattering the floor. They were already gonna need to clean the shit out of this corridor before anybody else showed up, or there were gonna be a lot of awkward questions.

At least you figure as much. ‘Who died?’ Is pretty much always an awkward question.

Dave leans over the body and captchalogues it, leaving behind a few candy red pools on the floor. He sighs. “Hope there’s a mop in the lab.”

“I can go get it,” you offer. “Get it all cleaned up while you dispose of… well… you. Then nobody else is any the wiser that this fucked up hoofbeast shit went down.”

Dave’s face twitches and he looks down at the floor again, avoiding your gaze. “Look, don’t read too much into this or anything,” he begins, his voice barely above a mumble. “But, like, disposing of bodies is an activity that I definitely don’t recommend as a solo quest. It’s depressing, it’s boring, you can’t really tell the story with any kind of rapport later, it’s all ‘hey guys, you should have been there, I threw a corpse into a lava ocean, it was the tits’, and then you just get funny looks. As opposed to being able to bounce that shit off the buddy who helped you out, then it’s all ‘oh, Rose, you won’t believe what Karkat and I got up to last night, am I right pal?’ ‘sure thing friendo, oh man, you would not believe the shit we got into, it was the wildest of corpse disposal parties, we’ll tell you all about it’.”

“‘Don’t read too much into it?’” You repeat. “Dave, in what universe is disposing of a corpse even _remotely_ romantic?”

Dave shrugs. “I mean, it wouldn’t be my first choice for a first date, and I was…” he trails off, blushing. “I just… fuck, after the shit we’ve been talking about, quadrants and feelings and human sexuality and shit, I was hoping the next time we did something together it’d be less…”

“Fucked up?” you guess, feeling your own blush.

“Unromantic.”

You feel the urge to laugh hysterically rise within you. Dave is standing here getting ready to dispose of his own corpse, and he’s worried about fucking up his confusing sort of-relationship with you? What the fuck even was this life he was living? “How about if I promise to let you take me on a real first date after we’re done being traumatised by this weird as fuck experience?”

Dave nods slowly. “Sounds good, I’ll take it, we’ll call that a sick as heck plan. So, you in?”

You sigh, and your stomach is twisting for entirely different reasons. “I can’t believe I’m saying this but yes, Dave, I will come with you to dispose of your own dead body.”

“See, under any other circumstances, that would have been a threat!” Dave’s tone almost sounds light, only the shake in his voice betraying him. “We’ve already got the rapport part down. This’ll be a great story we’ll share when we get to the new session, it’ll get the loudest of chortles and guffaws from all our chums.”

“We can construct the brilliant base for this hilarious fucked up story when we’ve actually finished fucking experiencing it,” you say. “Let’s go.”

You start down the corridor towards the stairs and Dave follows, the corridor echoing with your footsteps. You know you’d better hurry, it would be a bad time if somebody came across all of that fucking blood. Even in a rarely used side corridor, you didn’t want to take the risk.

“Is this because of what Vriska said?” you finally ask after the two of you walk in silence for a while.

“What, my trying to timehop away from her shitty meeting?” Dave says. “Obviously.”

“No,” you shake your head. “I mean why you didn’t stop and think about how it was a fucking stupid idea.”

Dave’s lips clamp together and you see his shoulders shake a little before he finally speaks again. “You know what, she’s right, that’s the worst part,” he says. “What the fuck is the point of having time travel powers unless you fucking use them?”

“You haven’t used them at all since you came to the meteor?” you ask.

Dave nods. “Until today.”

“Why not?”

Dave shrugs. “Shenanigans.”

You scoff. “Artful fucking dodge there, Strider, I am blatantly fucking misdirected by your obfuscating fucking divergence.”

Dave sighs, looking over at you with an expression you can tell is pained even through his shades. “Because next time I do it, I might be the doomed one.”

You blink. “Huh?”

“Every time I fuck up with these time shenanigans, it makes a doomed Dave,” he says, speaking a little too fast. “Like, how do I know one of these days the timeline I’m in isn’t the doomed one? What makes me different? Am I always the alpha Dave or will I end up in a doomed offshoot without even realizing it before I get a sword in the gut? How the fuck can I control something that’s somehow both fucking inevitable and totally unpredictable?”

You feel the writhing in your stomach get worse, your cheeks getting hot. You think about the dead Dave currently occupying this Dave’s sylladex, the paradox timeline he came from.

You think about the Karkat from that timeline, who probably found the body and didn’t get to look up and see a live Dave in front of him. A Karkat who had to live on without a Dave…

“Look, just don’t do anything stupidly heroic in your usual Striderian knight in shining doucheshades way,” you say, shoving that thought away into a dark recess of your mind so you can feel sick over it later. “Because it would really suck to be in a doomed timeline and have to wait for my inevitable death for a few dozen perigees on a hunk of rock without the one person I enjoy talking to. Besides the mayor of course, I feel like shit for even leaving that up for interpretation.”

You walk a few paces before pausing at the top of a flight of stairs, continuing to look at your shoes so you don’t have to look at him. Dave stops beside you and looks at you, confused. “How would it be a doomed timeline?” he asks. “I might be the resident expert on time shenanigans but I know that my being alive doesn’t necessarily make this the alpha timeline.”

“As far as I’m concerned any timeline without you in it is a doomed fucking timeline,” you say without thinking. It takes a second for you to process what just came out of your wordtrap and you freeze, feeling your face getting hot.

Dave says nothing for a while, and when you finally find the globes to look at him you see that his expression is completely astonished. “That’s…” he begins, then trails off. He would only look more shocked if you had punched him in the face with his own fist. “How do you figure that?”

“If you die in your session, it’ll fucking ruin it, Strider,” you say. You feel your legs shaking so you sit down, feet resting on the steps. “You managed to keep all your friends alive, even though you obviously had to watch yourself die so many fucking times to do it. You’re the alpha Dave because you’re the Dave who saves his fucking friends.” You hug your knees and stare listlessly down the dark staircase. “If I had died, maybe my session wouldn’t have been the death of so many of my friends. If I’d been the one to die, maybe they’d all still be here. I didn’t save them because I didn’t die.”

You feel Dave sit down next to you and you feel your face getting hot again. He leans over to look at you, and you can almost see the look in his eyes through his shades. “Karkat,” he whispers. “There is no fucking way that’s true.”

“Look, you talked about inevitability,” you say. “About shit being predestined and constant in time and space. If I’m in a session, then…” you trail off. Fuck, the last thing you want to do is cry in front of the guy who’s about to dispose of his own dead body. “Then that’s enough to fucking ruin it. I don’t even have to do anything. I just exist, and all around me people suffer and die.”

Dave frowns slightly, seeming to comprehend something. “So… when you found my body…”

“I thought I’d done it again, yeah,” you say, clenching your fists, hoping the pain of your claws in your own flesh would stop you from crying. “Thought I’d fucked up again and ended up with another dead friend on this fucking hellhole meteor. Another testament to my utter failure as a leader and a person. The alpha timeline would be better off if I just wasn’t fucking in it.”

The two of you sit in silence for a moment, and you give up the fight, letting the tears spill and slide down your cheeks. You squeeze your eyes shut and feel sick and pathetic and miserable and the worst sentient being in existence who absolutely would making things better by being dead, and you debate just throwing yourself down the stairs to make good on your assertion. End the bullshit. Fix everything. Be fucking dead.

You feel something warm on your cheek and you open your eyes, confused. You look down and see that Dave has his hand on your face, and he’s wiping away a tear with his thumb.

“I’ll say it again, Karkat,” he says, his voice shaking. “There is no fucking way that’s true.”

You consider jerking away from his hand but your facade crumbles, your thinkpan feeling like a burst dam flooding the whole of paradox space with your fear and your failure. You lean into his hand and the tears fall faster, your whole body shaking. “It’s absolutely fucking true,” you choke out through sobs. “This session would be better off without me. You…” you pause, shuddering. “You would be better off without me.”

“Karkat,” Dave’s hand moves and suddenly he’s holding you by the shoulders, not quite shaking you but holding you firmly, turning you in his direction. “That’s absolute fucking bullshit on so many levels.”

“How do you know?” Your voice is almost a wail now and you reach up to grab Dave’s shoulders. “There’s no way you can know that!”

“I know because my doomed self died protecting _you_!”

The two of you sit and stare at each other for a moment. You’re shocked to see that Dave is crying too, not bawling like you are but you can see his weird translucent human tears rolling down from under his shades.

  
“What the fuck?” you manage after a minute. “How do you… how the fuck do you even know that?!”

“Who the fuck cares?” Dave says, voice trembling. “Paradox space works in fucked up mysterious ways or some shit. I just know that that was how he… how I, died. The session needed you alive, Karkat. I… I needed you alive.”

You stare at him and can barely comprehend what you’re feeling. You’re caught between the sick fear of what it would mean to lose Dave, the memories of everything the two of you have shared over the last sweep, from arguments to friendship to something new, something… strange and confusing you haven’t even begun to parse through because there’s nothing scarier than a feeling you can’t quite put in just one quadrant, but you want to know what it is because it’s so new and so fucking amazing you can hardly stand it. You also feel a hopeless kind of anger as you look at him, thinking about his doomed self, about your doomed self who had to watch him die protecting you.

You give him a shove with both your hands, causing him to release you. He looks confused, hurt. “Huh?”

“So you just fucking left me alive in a doomed timeline without you, you fuckass?” you say, anger winning out yet again. “You up and fucking die in front of me and leave me with nothing but a shitty heroic corpse for company?”

“Hey, I’m sorry I didn’t want you to die, asshole,” Dave retorts, clearly unsure how to react. “Fucking forgive me if alt-timeline me wanted you to stay alive!”

“FUCK BEING ALIVE!” You yell. “FUCK BEING ALIVE WITHOUT YOU! I’D RATHER BE FUCKING DEAD.”

Dave stares at you for a moment. The two of you lock eyes and you feel the anger fading away, replaced with that sick fear that’s been clouding you ever since you found the body in the hallway. You don’t want to think about losing Dave. Your best friend… your…

_Fuck._

You throw yourself at him again, dragging him into a hug so hard it knocks the wind out of him. As you cling to him you feel the tears coming back, rolling down your cheeks and falling all over Dave’s cape. You feel him return the hug, slowly at first but then with a ferocity that matches your own, squeezing you so tight you almost feel your ribs creak in protest.

“Asshole,” you whisper.

“Yup,” he responds.

You stay like that for a while, both your sobs echoing down the stairwell in an eerie harmony. Your grip on him loosens after a little while, as does his on you, but you still keep your arms around each other. It’s something that would have made you feel awkward before, like you were imposing, but things were different now. You weren’t sure exactly how, but there was a difference there, something between you like an understanding you’d glimpsed before but had never truly grasped.

Two knights, scared and fighting constantly to hide it, trapped between accepting their doom and dreading it.

After a little longer you pull away and go back to hugging your knees. Dave keeps one arm around your shoulders and you don’t complain. “I feel like the others should put in a complaint to whoever made this bullshit game,” Dave says, wiping away tears with his free hand. “They ordered two knights to help them get through their sessions but they ended up with you and me.”

You snort. “Yeah, a pair of fucked up losers waiting to die for the good of paradox space.”

“That’s us,” Dave agrees. “Ready and waiting to get motherfuckin’ doomed.”

He moves his arm and you feel a curl of disappointment in your stomach, but when he stands up he holds out a hand. “We should go do this thing,” he says. “Then we can get back to the closest thing we can find to normal on this shitty flying rock.”

You accept Dave’s hand and he helps you up, the two of you sharing another look as he holds your hand just a little too long, meets your gaze just a second or two more than he normally would.

You’d sort those feelings out later. Gotta deal with the corpse situation first.

It takes about ten minutes to get to the lower lab, but your route is deserted, thank fuck. You pass under a cluster of fluorescents and have a moment of blind panic when you see the bright red stain on your sweater, but it isn’t yours, it’s Dead Dave’s.

You’re pretty sure you’ll never get used to humans having the same blood colour as you. In this particular situation, you hope you won’t have to.

“Still can’t believe Vriska said that shit,” you say as you turn on the lights in the lab. “If I’d been any closer to her I would have punched her right in the fucking protein chute, how the fuck can you call someone useless if they’ve seen themselves die hundreds of fucking times?!”

  
“Two hundred and five,” Dave says quietly.

  
“Huh?” you stop in your tracks in the middle of the lab, turning to stare at him.

  
“That’s how many times it’s happened,” he says.

  
Your eyes widen. “You remember how many _times_?”

  
“Shit like that has a tendency to sear itself into your brain,” Dave says. He shoves his hands into his pockets and crosses over to join you. “Seared like a steak that’s been cooked to fucking perfection. Plus it’s pretty hard to forget it when you keep on feeling it.”

  
You feel sick. “You… feel it?”

  
“Sorta,” Dave shrugs. “It’s like remembering something that happened to you in a dream I guess. A really shitty dream, kinda like one of those standing in front of a crowd in your underwear dreams except everyone’s killing you with swords.”

  
You feel your stomach clench and let out a low growl. “I’m gonna fucking kill her.”

  
Dave puts a hand on your shoulder. “She’s not worth it, man.”

  
“If she had even the BEGINNING of a fucking IDEA of the shit you’ve been through-”

  
“Karkat.”

  
“It’s SO unbelievably out of line, who the FUCK does she think she is? I’m gonna-”

  
“Karkat!”

  
“-beat her with a fucking 8-ball until it’s blue as her shitty fucking blood, I fucking SWEAR-”

  
Dave grabs both your shoulders again. “KARKAT.”

  
“WHAT.”

  
“Can we please dispose of this body before we figure out all the ways you’re gonna kick Vriska’s ass?”

  
You pause in your rant, swallowing abruptly. He had a point.

  
“Right,” you say. “Incinerator’s over here, let’s get this over with.”

  
Dave uncaptchalogues the body right by the incinerator door but it’s still an ordeal to get it into the device. Dave’s body is heavy and limp and it’s really hard not to think about just how identical he is to the Dave who’s helping you stuff the body into the chute beside you.

  
“This is so fucked up,” Dave mutters as the two of you struggle to angle the corpse the right way. “I feel like I should be hitting Rose up for some kind of therapy session after this. Ask her what it means that I’m so cool and nonchalant about burning my own corpse.”

  
“You were sobbing into my shirt fifteen minutes ago.”

  
“That was a feelings jam, those don’t count.”

  
“If you’re calling that a feelings jam remind me to book my own therapy session with Lalonde, because if that’s a feelings jam then I’m the fucking Condesce herself.”

  
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, your majesty, now help me out and put your fucking back into lifting my corpse.”

  
“Shut the fuck up, Strider, it’s not my fault your rotting alt-self meatsack is heavy as shit.”

  
“Did you just call me fat?”

  
“OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE.”

  
You continue bickering as you leverage the body into the incinerator, and you feel relieved. Maybe it wasn’t the best reaction to have after all of that death and crying, but it was helping you both stay sane, even if you’d be spending the next perigee staring at the ceiling on Rose’s therapy couch telling her about this fucked up debacle.

  
The two of you dispose of the body with one final push into the incinerator and you hear it thud limply against the sides of the chute as it falls into the flames below.

  
“I feel like I should say something,” Dave gasps, slightly out of breath from all the heavy lifting. “Feels wrong not to say something when we’re having a corpse party for my own corpse.”

  
“This is quite possibly the worst fucking corpse party I’ve ever been to,” you grumble, wiping your hands on your pants. There wasn’t a lot of blood, but there was enough to make you feel uneasy.

  
“Been to a lot of corpse parties, have you?”

  
“Fuck you, you know this shit is a weird as fuck human custom, why would you even ask me that?”

  
“Whatever,” Dave stood up straight and held his hands out in front of him like he was addressing a crowd. “‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to mourn the death of David Elizabeth Strider, a hero ripped from the fabric of paradox space too soon.’”

  
“‘Elizabeth?’” you ask. You were pretty sure that was a human girl’s name.

  
“It’s an ironic joke, just go with it,” Dave mutters before returning to his ‘address a crowd of mourners’ voice. “‘He died fucking with timelines like a chump, and was laid to rest here by himself and his nearest and dearest…uh… person… Karkat Vantas, who he also died protecting, like a chump.’”

  
You bristle a bit at those words but you look at him and see that he’s smiling. You shake your head at him and lean against his shoulder, putting one hand against the incinerator door.

  
“Thanks for dying to save my life,” you say into the chute.

  
Dave’s breath hitches in his throat and you feel his shoulder shake beneath your head. You pull away and give him a punch on the arm, followed by another hug.

  
“Ow!” Dave yells. “The fuck?!”

  
“Now don’t you fucking _dare_ do it again, you bulgebiting fuckstick,” you growl. “If anyone’s gonna die heroically, it’s gonna be me!”

  
He laughs. “Are we seriously going to argue about who’s going to die first?”

  
“No,” you say, voice slightly muffled by his cape. “It’s not an argument, because it’s fucking gonna be me.”

  
“Well, fuck that,” Dave pulls away slightly, and suddenly your faces are inches apart. “How about we try something different?”

  
You swallow, your face suddenly very warm. You can see all of the freckles sprinkled across his nose. “Yeah?” you say. “What’s that?”

  
Dave smiles. “Let’s try being alive.”

  
Then he presses his lips to yours and you forget about everything else.

  
You don’t know how long the two of you stand there in front of the incinerator, arms wrapped around each other and mouths joined, tasting each other, finally feeling what’s been bubbling beneath the surface of your friendship for over half a sweep. Dave kisses exactly like you had expected him to, confident and eager and soft (so soft, how the fuck do humans survive being this soft?), yet somehow more, an amplified reality that is so beyond your wildest dreams you scarcely believe this is real.

  
When you pull away, Dave is still smiling. You smile back, still a little shaky but more from breathlessness than fear.

  
“That is definitely not how I planned on this going,” Dave mumbles, resting his forehead against yours.

  
“You had a plan?” you feel yourself well and truly blushing now. Your cheeks are probably red as fuck right now but for once in your life you don’t care.

  
“I’ve always got plans, dude,” Dave grins. “Apart from a brief twenty-four hour internet almost-relationship with Jade, I’ve never dated anybody before, and I was gonna do it fucking right, let me tell you.”

  
“So this definitely isn’t the first date?” you say, glancing over at the incinerator. “Or did your plan involving your own corpse party in this romantic escapade?”

  
“It was one of many possibilities I considered,” Dave says, and you can hear his voice finally regaining its characteristic nonchalant drawl. “It wasn’t like it was plan A or anything. Not even a plan B. More like a plan C or D, or shit, maybe a plan M. I always seem to die in plan M.”

  
You shake your head. “This is so fucked up,” you mutter, reaching down to find his hand. “This is probably the most fucked up way anyone has ever gotten into a matespritship, or whatever the fuck this is, in the history of paradox space.”

  
Dave squeezes your hand and kisses you again, and for a moment your thinkpan stops working. “Would you really want it any other way?” he whispers against your lips.

  
You shake your head and squeeze back. “Fuck no.”

  
The two of you kiss again, all thoughts of corpses and fear forgotten, and you find yourself thinking that maybe, just maybe, for all the death in doomed timelines and acts of fucked up foolish heroism, maybe this time the two of you had found a way to truly save each other.

  
You sure as fuck hope so.

**Author's Note:**

> Special shout-out and thanks to my accidental muse and sadstuck idea buddy, [bettycrockerssketchbook](http://bettycrockerssketchbook.tumblr.com/), for planting this idea in my thinkpan and providing some of the better pieces of the Karkat dialogue you read in this fic. 
> 
> Lyrics in the summary and title are from the song _Being Alive_ from Steven Sondheim's _Company_. Listen to it while you read if you like crying a lot.


End file.
